


always gold

by saffronHeliotrope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Just lots of smut ok, M/M, Morning Sex, Porn with maybe a little plot, Sex with old friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:24:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saffronHeliotrope/pseuds/saffronHeliotrope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You take down your usual mug, turn it around in your hands. No conclusions, no assumptions, no morals to the story, just hands and skin in the dark, a soft cry that echoes in your ears as if it had been etched on your brain. You can’t remember now if the cry was yours. But you do remember the terrible sudden intimacy of bodies, the intoxicating license to touch and be touched.  All the usual rules of interaction -- a hug but not a kiss; touch the shoulder but not the neck; shake hands but don’t turn the hand over to investigate the secret hollowed palm, the inside of the wrist soft and translucent -- all those unspoken barriers, all torn away at once.</p><p>It's a morning like any other, except that there's someone sleeping in your bed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	always gold

**Author's Note:**

> _we were opposites at birth, I was steady as a hammer_  
>  _no one worried cause they knew right where I'd be_  
>  _and they said you were the crooked kind, that you'd never have no worth_  
>  _but you were always gold to me_  
>  \- [Radical Face](http://youtu.be/vqc2uOunPdA)

The early morning light in the kitchen is blue edging to gold when you stumble in. The linoleum is pleasantly cool under your bare feet, and in the silence your footsteps make shushing sounds, the cuffs of your flannel pajama pants dragging behind your heels. A wide yawn nearly splits your face; unaccustomed muscles pull when you roll your shoulders experimentally.

There are wine glasses on the counter, which you studiously ignore. You absently rub a hand across your bare stomach. There might be a few marks on you this morning, on hip and shoulder, if your half-fogged and suddenly wildly implausible memory of last night serves.

 _Huh._ Last night. You scrub a hand through your messy hair.

Coffee. Coffee first.

It’s a little ritual, bone-deep with familiarity, bred so well into your muscles that you can do it half-asleep, and often do. You plug in the coffeemaker, an antique Mr. Coffee machine which you swiped from your father’s kitchen when you bought him that fancy new Keurig for Father’s Day a few years back. It’s ancient, hideous, and indestructible, cream-colored with a peeling wood-grain patterned decal along the sides, but it makes decent coffee, and you use it as balance in your complicated mental karma-reckoning to justify buying the good expensive beans from the snobby coffeeshop down the street. You pull out the carafe and swirl it under the faucet, rinsing out ghostly traces of yesterday’s dregs, then fill it up to the line that says “4.” Pause; turn the water back on, fill it up to “8.”

You empty the carafe into the tank, then pull out the filter basket and dump yesterday’s grounds -- damp, compacted, stale-smelling -- into the trash. Your dad would scold you for this: well-meaning but heedless kid, grown into a comfortably sloppy adult, willing to cut corners when you grew up and learned that nobody would take away your allowance when you didn’t disassemble and scour the coffeemaker every morning. Dishes in the sink, unwiped spatters on the stovetop -- strange that such little transgressions are the marks of your adulthood.

The paper filter rustles softly under your fingers, and the beans rattle into the grinder: all the little noises you never notice until there’s someone else who might hear them too. Wincing, you press down on the grinder switch; the whirr and clatter are deafening in the quiet kitchen. When you let up on the grinder, you listen carefully down the hall for any stirring. Silence still.

You measure out the coffee the way you were taught: a heaping cereal spoonful for each number on the carafe, and one more for good measure. Most mornings, five; today, nine.

The flick of a switch, and the old machine clicks and rattles out the sound of every morning of your life. You brood, elbows on the counter, stretching your lower back gingerly as the first drops plink into the bottom of the carafe. Last night. A chance meeting, each of you out with friends; one cocktail became two then three. You dredged up embarrassing stories about the past, inside jokes dead for a decade and a half. Your respective friends drifted away until it was just the two of you at the bar. Falling back into old camaraderie: casual touches, gradually growing more purposeful. An invitation, an acceptance, a lot of wine. More stories, reenactments. Hand on shoulder. Hand on knee. Orbiting; slipping past the event horizon; a slow-motion crashing together, impossible, inevitable.

If you let yourself, you will think things like _moving toward this for the last twenty years_.

Instead, you take down your usual mug, turn it around in your hands. No conclusions, no assumptions, no morals to the story, just hands and skin in the dark, a soft cry that echoes in your ears as if it had been etched on your brain. You can’t remember now if the cry was yours. But you do remember the terrible sudden intimacy of bodies, the intoxicating license to touch and be touched. All the usual rules of interaction -- a hug but not a kiss; touch the shoulder but not the neck; shake hands but don’t turn the hand over to investigate the secret hollowed palm, the inside of the wrist soft and translucent -- all those unspoken barriers, all torn away at once. 

A hand in your hair, a mouth on the pulse-point under your jaw, a brush of fingers on the shivery tender place between your hipbone and groin. The sound of an in-drawn breath, the taste of someone else’s skin.

Mr. Coffee’s last death-rattle startles you out of your reverie. You fill your mug, catch an errant drip from the lip of the carafe and lick your finger. Clunk of the mug on the counter, tug and whoosh of the refrigerator door, and you pour in the milk, watching the creamy clouds bloom under the surface. You put the milk away, lean back against the counter, and take the first sip.

Bitterness, dark and chocolate-rich on your tongue, cut and mellowed and swirled through with cream. This is your favorite moment of any morning. Warmth melts through your fingers, blossoms in your belly. You close your eyes and breathe.

It’s a morning like any other, except that there’s someone sleeping in your bed. You laugh a little at yourself, incredulous.

All at once you push yourself upright, get down your second-favorite mug and fill it. On a whim and a hazy memory you rummage through the cabinet of baking supplies (rarely used; only there for your father’s sake) and pull down the canister of white sugar. You shovel in three big spoonfuls, stir, taste, grimace. Black sludge, sweet as sin. You hope you’ve remembered correctly. You take both mugs, pad down the dark hallway with your heart beating faster than it should, nudge the bedroom door open with your foot.

Gold light pours in through the high windows, limning and buoying and infusing the pillows, the white comforter, the body sprawled there, until the whole room floats in a brilliant haze.

For a moment you can’t breathe for the strangeness of it.

The man in your bed is golden and lovely, long limbs loose and heavy with sleep, half buried in the bedclothes. You are hit with a bolt of vertigo; he is at once utterly familiar and utterly foreign. There was a time that you knew his body as well as you knew your own, as close as if you were brothers: hundreds of sleepovers, his sleeping bag stretched out beside yours on the living room floor, the two of you tangled in blanket forts and treehouses. Roughhousing in the back yard or the swimming pool -- he was all knobby knees, skinny arms fuzzed with white down, and you were as sturdily built as a little brick wall, but he always eeled his way out from under you, slippery and laughing, pinning you in merciless headlocks until you knocked him over with brute force. You close your eyes and remember him, towheaded and freckled, lanky with adolescence, always hungry, always beside you on those hazy summer afternoons that went on forever. You would know him if you only saw the edge of his profile through a crowd, the back of his shoulder glimpsed through a doorway. You would know him if you were blind. He is as much a part of you as you are yourself.

You open your eyes again, and the memory of him then lines up against the reality of him now, fitting together like puzzle pieces. He is the logical conclusion of that unfinished boy, tall and lean, honed and polished. Last night fits into your story like the keystone into an arch. You never dreamed you would see him like this, and now you can’t imagine anything else.

Dave shifts in the bed, rolls over. Your heart leaps when he squints blearily at you. You fight hard against the grin that wants to break out all over your face, biting your lip; you were always too open, too easy to read, and he used to tease you endlessly for it. You can feel uncertainty and giddiness chase themselves across your face.

“Morning,” you say carefully instead.

He grunts.

You carry the coffee over and perch on the edge of the bed, strangely afraid to get too close, unable to stay away. “Coffee for you.”

His hair is completely, hilariously rumpled. “It’s too early to be alive.”

You snort a laugh, sounding instantly in your own ears like your twelve-year-old self. Perhaps he hears it too, because he smiles a little, rubs his eyes and pushes himself to sit up against the headboard. The sheet is bunched around his hips, but you can’t stop yourself from staring at the golden skin, the spare, elegant planes of his torso.

God, he’s beautiful. You never realized.

You hand over his mug, bending down toward your own to try to hide the flush creeping up your cheeks. “You can’t possibly still sleep as late as you used to when we were kids,” you say.

His long fingers wrap around the mug. “Later, if I can get away with it. Don’t tell me you’ve turned into a morning person like your old man.” His voice is low and rough with sleep, and the intimacy of it makes your stomach do a slow flip.

“Guilty,” you say, smiling, nervous, elated. “I can’t help it. It’s in my blood.”

He groans. “Remember how he used to get us up at the crack of dawn when I’d sleep over? I think he honestly felt that sleeping past seven a.m. was a clear sign of impending moral bankruptcy.”

“Gateway to bad behaviors like drinking milk straight from the carton and listening to rock ’n’ roll music,” you say. He actually laughs at that. “And yet you always wanted to sleep over.”

“Yeah, well, the fact that he also made us bacon and waffles every morning made up for it a little bit. Also, you made the best blanket forts. How could I say no to that?”

You remember. And when you slept over at his place, his brother would let you sleep as long as you wanted; you would wake at one or two in the afternoon, feeling groggy and decadent and ravenously hungry, and you’d gorge yourselves on cold pizza and play video games until the sun went down.

He takes a sip of his coffee and sighs deeply, face going soft and reverent. He closes his eyes and his head drops back against the headboard. You chuckle. He cracks one eye open.

“What.”

“Nothing. You just make the same face I do. The first-sip-of-coffee face.”

“The first sip is the best.” He peers down at his mug, then at you. “How’d you know how I take it?”

A warm glow of pride suffuses your chest. You look down into your coffee, happy, embarrassed to be so happy. “That was a lucky guess. Dirk used to drink it the same way.”

You glance at him, and he’s smiling at you, a frank, honest smile. “Jesus, John, you’re so sweet. It shouldn’t be legal for someone to be so sweet.”

“Not as sweet as your disgusting coffee. Seriously, how do you not have a mouthful of cavities?”

“I’m immune. I was raised on a steady diet of junk food -- my bro probably mixed my baby formula in orange soda. Sugar gives me my powers.”

“The power of insulin shock. You’re going to have diabetes by the time you’re forty.”

“Says the man whose father served him a layer cake -- a whole layer cake -- for dessert, every night of his childhood.”

“Well. Luckily we don’t all grow up to be exactly like our parents,” you say lightly.

He _hmms_ thoughtfully into his cup. You drink your coffee. This ought to be awkward -- this ought to be horribly, paralyzingly awkward, but it’s not. You wouldn’t call it easy, or comfortable -- you’re acutely aware that he’s naked under the sheet, and the events of last night hang between you like a crazy dream, after all -- but you’re just bantering like old times. It’s nice. It’s companionable.

Until suddenly it isn’t. His eyes flicker to your face, then away. You’re sitting in your pajama pants and your childhood best friend is naked in your bed and you had sex with him last night, for fuck’s sake; you are completely at sea.

“Dave,” you say, lowering your cup.

“You know, actually, I think we do,” he says abruptly.

“Sorry?”

“Turn into our parents. I think we do. You, for example. You may try to hide it, but there’s a lot of your dad in you.”

You can feel yourself blushing and you try to cover it by clowning: “Oh God, I hope not -- save me from pleated slacks and sensible shoes,” despite the fact that the great majority of your shoes are, in fact, very sensible, but he cuts you off.

“No, I mean that you’re more serious than you used to be, like he is. Less of a goofy kid. More--” he gestures at you eloquently -- “more you.” He’s looking at you with those hooded eyes, and you realize that for all the time you’ve spent together in your lives, this is the longest stretch that you’ve ever seen him without his sunglasses. You feel stripped down to your very soul under his gaze.

“You liked that goofy kid,” you say softly, uncertain.

“I loved that goofy kid,” he says. He leans over very deliberately and places his coffee cup on the bedside table. “I just never wanted to sleep with him.” He takes your mug out of your hands and sets it beside his.

“Oh,” you say, and it’s all you can say, because his hands are on your waist, thumbs stroking low over your hipbones, and you do what you’ve been wanting to do since he woke up: you run your fingers through the silky ash-blond of his hair, settling and smoothing it as he watches your face. Your hand drifts down to his jaw, gold stubble rough under your fingertips, and you ghost your thumb over his lower lip.

“John,” he says, his hands tightening on your hips as you run your knuckles down the side of his neck, your palm light over the cap of his shoulder. It seems impossible, unfair, that you should be allowed to touch him like this, like you’ve been missing out, like you are just discovering a treasure that should always have been yours.

It seems more momentous in the clear morning light; last night was hazy and impulsive, not purely fueled but certainly abetted by alcohol, a moment stolen out of real life. But this now, this is real. And all your uncertainty is gone. You are entranced by his mouth, thin and mobile, minutely curved. He sees you watching, and just the tip of his tongue darts out to wet his lower lip. When you lean in toward him, when your lips brush over his, he makes an almost imperceptible sound in the back of his throat.

You take his mouth slowly and thoroughly, opening him up, figuring out what he likes. You both taste like coffee but you don’t mind. You suck the traces of sweetness from his lips, and he melts.

You don’t care how much sugar he wants in his coffee, not if it means you get to do this afterward.

He kicks the sheet off his legs and moves closer, reaching for you; you get him by the hips and haul him in to straddle your lap. Any worry about reciprocation is abruptly gone; he’s as hard as you are. He takes your glasses without breaking the kiss and fumbles them onto the nightstand. You could lose yourself in the feeling of his mouth on yours, the slide of his tongue, but you are keenly, vitally aware of his nakedness, his long legs draped around your hips. Your hands run down his back, over the curves of his ass.

You feel him smile against your mouth, and he shoves his hand down the front of your pants and wraps his hand loosely around your cock.

You have to fight not to buck your hips up into his grasp, but you do squeeze his ass roughly, and he rewards you with a tighter grip. Not tight enough, though, and his strokes are maddeningly light. You latch your mouth to the skin below his ear in an open-mouthed kiss; you remember from last night how much he liked that. But when his fingers find your nipple, pinching and rubbing, you groan against the side of his neck.

“Remember the titty-twister phase we had when we were about fourteen?” he says with a laugh, a little breathless. “If those two nerds could see us now.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m glad they can’t,” you say, arching up into his touch. “Fourteen-year-old John was pretty invested in the idea of being straight. He’d throw a shitfit.” You take hold of his dick for emphasis, and he grunts and tightens his legs around your waist. “What a moron.”

“Tried to tell you,” Dave says, trying to push into your hand. You loosen up, teasing him.

“That I wasn’t straight?”

“That you were a moron.”

“Har har,” you say, and tip him back into the pillows against the headboard. He protests a little, but his eyes go dark as he watches you kick off your pants and crawl up between his legs. He looks you up and down, unabashedly.

“Fuck, John,” he says, “when the hell did you get so gorgeous?”

You feel the heat rising across your shoulders, up your cheeks. “I’ve been wondering the same about you.” And he is, stretched out on your pillows: clean lines and long muscles, the morning light glinting in the coarse blond hairs on his limbs, winding down from his navel. You trace your hand down over his stomach, appreciative, loving the way he twists under your touch. His cock is hot and heavy and flushed under your fingers, and you lean down and lick a broad, firm stripe from base to tip. He makes a low needy sound, his eyes locked on yours, and it may as well be a lit match on gasoline. You’re seized with the sudden urgent desire to take him apart.

The sound that he makes when you swallow him down to the hilt is pure poetry and you will be replaying it in your dreams for the rest of your life. You’re good at this -- you’re proud of how good you are at this. You set a relentless pace and keep it going, taking him all the way down then backing off again, over and over, working your tongue firm and then soft against him. Within seconds he’s tensing under you. His fingers thread through your hair, and you hum low in your throat around him. Moments more and his legs are trembling, heels digging into the sheets.

It’s only a minute or two before he cups your face in his hands and pulls you off him. He’s flushed and panting. “Jesus Christ,” he chokes out. You lay a few soft kisses in the hollow of his hip, and his cock bobs against your cheek. “That was a thing of beauty.”

“You don’t want me to keep going?”

“Part of me wants nothing more.”

You make a little snort-laugh against his skin. “I don’t think I need three guesses to figure out which part.”

“Dork,” he says, combing his fingers through your hair. “But I want something else too and if you’d kept that up for much longer I’d’ve been done.”

“Mmm,” you say, sucking a little mark onto the crest of his hipbone. He hisses. “I think I like the sound of that.”

“You should,” he says, and tugs you up to kiss you hard, then maneuvers you neatly over onto your back. Looking up at him, it’s a little hard to catch your breath. On your list of sights you never thought you’d see but are infinitely grateful for, Dave Strider kneeling naked over you in your bed is currently number one with a bullet.

He lowers himself over you, all his skin electric and warm against yours. His erection grinds over yours and you exhale hard and catch his hips, holding him fast and pushing up against him. He catches your earlobe in his teeth, then says rough in your ear, “Lube?”

Your stomach does an anticipatory flip. “Yeah. Um. Just. I’ll get it.” He lets you up, and you roll over away from him, reaching for the nightstand drawer. Your hand closes around the bottle, but before you turn back he comes up behind you, hands smoothing over the breadth of your back.

“Goddamn,” he says between kisses across your trapezius. “Lay me down to die on a bed of John Egbert’s shoulders. You been blacksmithing much in your spare time?” You bow your head when he kisses the back of your neck, embarrassed and pleased.

“It’s just good genes,” you say, half apologizing, and it’s true -- your dad is broad too, and it’s not like you worked for it.

“I don’t care if it was a magical boon from your fairy godmother,” he says, and you shiver when his teeth scrape over your skin. “You’re gorgeous.” And then his hand comes around your hip and takes a grip on your cock, and you moan. He grinds slow and purposeful against your ass. This quick flipping between teasing and predatory is driving you out of your mind. You reach up and back and bury your hand in his hair, twisting around to kiss him, and he kisses back, searing, his tongue pushing into your mouth like he’s done with waiting, like he wants everything, now.

He lets you roll onto your back, and while you’re still trying to scrape your brain together enough to ask he takes the little bottle out of your hand and drizzles some lube onto his fingers. Your heart is thundering. You didn’t get this far last night -- you got each other off with hands and mouths -- but right now you want him, all of him, so much that you think you might die of it. He kisses you again, and you tense up, expecting his touch, but it doesn’t come; abruptly you realize that he’s reaching around behind himself.

Warmth floods you from your groin to your throat. _Yes, oh God, yes._ You slide your hand down his arm and encircle his wrist with your fingers. “Let me?” you ask low against his lips.

He pulls back an inch to look you in the eyes, then flashes you a quick crooked little smile. You find the lube bottle where he dropped it in the sheets and slick up your fingers. He shifts forward, straddling you, bracing himself on elbows over your shoulders as you reach down between his legs, gliding over his dick, behind his balls.

He huffs out a breath when you stroke over the puckered skin, and his eyes close when you press a finger up into him. He’s hot and velvety and so tight around your finger. Your cock jumps involuntarily at the feeling, and at the sound he makes. He digs a hand into your hair. The little shifts of his body are maddening above you.

You press another finger in absolutely as soon as you think he can take it. He freezes, then melts, latching on to your collarbone in a messy open-mouthed kiss, pushing eagerly back onto your fingers. You bend your knees up to hold him in place. You’re catastrophically hard as you work him open, and with the glancing friction of his dick against yours it’s all you can do not to grab both together and just go to town.

You love this, though. It’s intoxicating how he goes pliant, relaxing for you, burying his face in your shoulder. His skin is practically burning to the touch. You turn your head and find his mouth again, and kiss him slowly, deeply, in perfect counterpoint to your fingers moving inside him. The tension melts out of him and his body gradually goes boneless; his lips are open, soft against yours, slick and swollen from kissing. You cup the back of his neck with your hand. You can’t get enough of him. When you trace over his bottom lip with your tongue, he whines; when you push back into his mouth, he moans.

Every inch of you feels so sensitive that you’re afraid you’re going to come just from kissing him.

You’re about to work a third finger in when he suddenly rears up and pulls off your hand entirely. He braces himself with hands pressed flat to your stomach. “Condom?” he asks shakily.

“Drawer,” you say, and are treated to a closer look at his torso as he stretches forward and reaches over you. You stroke your hands down his flexing stomach, trailing your fingers over his outlined muscles, cobblestone abs and the deep v to his groin. A thousand things you want to say pile up behind your teeth: _Jesus, you’re cut_ , and _how did you grow up to be so beautiful_ and _please don’t figure out I’m still basically a stupid kid_ , and most of all _stay, stay and don’t ever stop_.

Before you can embarrass yourself he sits back, condom in hand. You prop yourself up on your elbows, quivering as he rolls it down over your dick, and then he pushes you flat again with a hand on your chest. You’re ready with the lube, but he takes the bottle from you again, pouring some out in his hand and smoothing it over you. You ball your fists in the sheets and take deep breaths. You want to make this last, and at this rate, it’s going to be a struggle.

He kneels up over you. You reach down to steady yourself, guide yourself in. He pauses, poised above you, the head of your cock just pressing against his hole, and his eyes meet yours.

Something inside you leaps in either exhilaration or terror.

You can spare no thought for it, though, as he moves downward, as the tight heat of him overwhelms you millimeter by millimeter. “John, _fuck_ ,” he whispers as the heavy ridge of the head of your cock slips inside, and you shiver at the word, the act, the stripped-bare reverence on his face. He’s gorgeous. You fight to keep perfectly motionless, but when he pauses with you half inside, you push yourself carefully up on one elbow, stroke your fingers through his hair and down his cheek.

“Ok?” you ask, voice as steady as you can make it.

“Perfect,” he breathes, and flashes you that little grin again, and slips down a little farther. You fall back with a bitten-off sob. You want to grab him, pound into him, but instead he’s taking his time, torturously slow, and you don’t know if it’s for his sake or yours. You can feel your heartbeat everywhere -- in your toes curled tight, in your fingertips digging into his thighs, in your cock, encased in the slick velvet heat of him.

You can’t take your eyes off him. His eyes close and his mouth drops softly open as he takes more of you in. There’s a beautiful pink flush up his chest and across his cheeks, and the sunlight blazing on your closed curtains makes the hair falling tangled across his forehead into a halo. You’re seized with a sudden irrational jealousy. You hate everyone else who has seen him like this. You hate everyone who got to him first.

Even as he settles over you, even as you both groan at the sensation of you fully seated inside him, you think, _oh no, this is dangerous, this is trouble_.

And then even that thought deserts you as he starts to move, only in tiny shifts at first but soon in longer strokes. You run your hands up his legs and sides -- he’s all coiled muscle and sinew, all honed slender strength. Then he inches forward on his knees, tilts his hips differently, and rocks down on you again while you instinctively curl up to meet him, and you both cry out. It’s perfect. He’s perfect.

The rhythm he sets is merciless: fast enough that you can’t fully recover between strokes; slow enough that once you equalize and get accustomed to the feeling of him, you’re still just shy of the stimulation you need. It’s wonderful and maddening and he never falters. He shoots you a half-lidded look, the ghost of a triumphant smirk. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He gets you on a plateau and keeps you there, and from the feel of it, he could keep you there forever. The thought makes you churn in desperate anticipation.

Two can play at that. You wrap your still-slippery hand loosely around his cock, and on his next downstroke you tug lightly, with a little twist of your wrist around the head. He bites his lip and goes _mmmph_ , hips stuttering ever so slightly as he pushes back up into your hand. You keep it loose, giving him just a little friction but making him work for it, and you’re rewarded with the tiniest uptick in his body’s metronome. There’s a fine sheen of sweat on his golden skin, and you trail your hand up his torso, rubbing over a nipple with fingers and thumb until he actually whines, low in his throat.

You need more. Your brain is liquefying and all your muscles coiling tight as piano wire and he’s still not giving it to you, and you want to seize his hips and just hammer up into him, but you keep telling yourself _wait, wait, one more, one more_. And then without warning, he stops. He stops poised at the top of a stroke, just the head of your cock inside him, and you nearly choke. “Oh God, Dave, don’t stop, why’d you stop?”

“Can we turn over?”

“Fuck, yes, of course, just, please,” you babble, and he’s off you and settling on his back, and you curl over him on hands and knees.

He draws his knees up and you take a dumbfounded moment just to look at him spread out for you. Then he says, “Any day now, John,” with that old _don’t be a derp, Egderp_ look you remember so well, and you guide yourself back into him, pressing all the way down like you’re coming home.

You try a few strokes, finding your way, and God, it feels good to move. Then he says, “Wait,” and pulls the pillow out from behind his head, shoving it instead under his hips, and with the new angle you can get your knees under you and when you push back in his whole body seizes like he’s been electrocuted.

“Oh God,” he says, ragged, “Fuck, John, again, do that again,” and you do, pushing as deep as you can until your hips are pressed flush against the lush curves of his ass. He grabs wildly at your arms, your shoulders. He sounds completely wrecked.

“Can I move?” you ask, breathless.

“Yes, _yes_ , Jesus, please move.” So you curl your toes into the sheets and you move, thrusting at last the way you’ve wanted to, hard and fast. It’s almost too intense, the curl of his body under yours, the sounds he’s making, the pressure and warmth you’re burying yourself in again and again. His feet hook behind your back, and his hands pull you down for a kiss, feverish and sloppy. You groan into his mouth and go faster. You’re drowning.

He arches under you, trembling, and suddenly fists his cock, brutal and fast. Your vision is starting to go white around the edges. You wrap your hand around his and work him over hard. He clutches at you, convulsing, and wet slickness coats your knuckles and stripes of white land on his flexing stomach. You fuck him through it, desperately careening for the edge while he shouts your name, while he comes and keeps coming.

That’s what does it: your name from his lips, his voice straining and cracking and stretching the syllable into a cry, a plea, a hymn. The pleasure shoots in a white-hot bolt up your spine, and you pull him closer, push yourself deeper, lose your rhythm, let yourself fall. Your orgasm takes you like a maelstrom, and you fly.

It might be hours later when you finally open your eyes and lift your head. He’s looking up at you with those naked eyes completely unguarded. You stare down at him, trying to scrape your brain together. Your mind is a searing blank, wiped utterly clean.

“Holy shit,” he says.

“Yeah,” you manage. “Wow.”

He’s looking at you with a look you’ve never seen, and you realize that you have no idea what’s going on in there. You, who learned to decipher a thousand different gradations of poker face and shades -- you can’t read him at all like this. So you’re almost startled when he reaches up and pushes your hair off your sweaty forehead, strokes his thumb along your cheek.

The effect is marred a bit when he immediately grimaces and shoves at you. “Hip cramp,” he grits out. You manage to pull out and crawl off the bed without falling over, though your legs are dangerously wobbly. He gingerly stretches out his legs while you deal with the condom. You look at his stomach, spattered and sticky, and then stumble to the bathroom for a wet washcloth.

In the harsh bathroom light your lips look swollen and bruised and your hair is an irredeemable disaster. There’s a spectacular purpling love-bite over your right collarbone. You press two fingers to it and think about his mouth.

When you get back to your bedroom he has arranged the pillows to his liking and wiped up the worst of the mess on his stomach with a wad of tissues. You approach the bed, washcloth in hand, and you want to do it yourself, but it suddenly seems too close, too presumptuous. Your idiotic uncertainty is back. You hand the washcloth over, sheepish. He wipes down his stomach and his hands, then lobs the washcloth in the general direction of your hamper. You can hear your father’s voice chiding you about water and the finish on hardwood floors, and you pointedly do not go pick it up.

Instead, you hover awkwardly and try to make it look like you’re not hovering awkwardly, wondering if you should put on some clothes, until Dave says irritably, “Jesus Christ, Egbert, get over here.”

With a rush of gratitude you climb back into the bed beside him. “How was I supposed to know if you were a cuddler or not? Cut me some slack here, man.”

“You should remember from last night,” he says, pushing you onto your back, arranging your limbs so he can flop half on top of you. His head settles on your shoulder, his breath warm on your neck, his warmth all under your skin. It’s disconcerting how well you fit together. You pull the sheet up over both of you. “I stayed, didn’t I? If I were anti-cuddling I’d’ve crashed on your couch or gone back to my hotel.”

His hotel. _Right._ “All I remember is that you were snoring within minutes,” you say, tracing your fingertips gently over the dip of his spine, the span of his shoulderblades.

“I don’t snore.” You can feel the vibration of his voice in his chest. His eyelashes brush against your skin.

“Right. Keep telling yourself that.”

He grunts, eyes closed.

“Dave? You’re not falling asleep on me, are you?”

“Weren’t you paying attention earlier? Weekend days don’t start until at least one in the afternoon. That means I’ve got four, maybe five more hours of sleep still coming to me.”

“Can I at least --”

“No. Stay put. Your services are required.” You draw breath to protest, and he says, “Nope. Stay.”

 _Stay._ You stay.

You listen to his breathing for a few minutes, make a careful mental map of the feeling of his body against yours. You’re starting to think he’s really asleep when he says abruptly, “John. _Shhh._ ”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You’re thinking. You think louder than a jet engine. Hasn’t anyone ever told you this?” When you don’t respond, he lifts his head, props his chin on your chest. “Are you freaking out? You’re doing the _I’m freaking out and trying to hide it_ face.”

“No, I’m not freaking out!” He just looks at you, those impassive eyes watching you the way they’ve always watched you. “Maybe a little.” His face doesn’t move one iota, but you know he’s hiding a smile, and not an unkind one. You catch his hand on impulse, almost but don’t quite summon the courage to kiss his knuckles, his calloused palm. “This is a big change. And you’re ok with it?”

Now he smiles for real and lays his head back down on your shoulder. “Yes, it’s a change, and yes, I’m ok with it. And so are you. I am not going to just lie here after what was arguably the best sex I’ve ever had and listen to you wring your hands. Calm the fuck down.”

While you’re still recovering from that, he says, “We should have done this ten years ago.”

His voice is sleepy and content. You comb your fingers through his tangled hair and bend your head to the top of his. He smells like sweat and sex and perfectly, totally himself. “I’m glad we didn’t,” you say before you can stop yourself.

There’s a pause. “No?” His voice is light, but he’s utterly still with listening.

“No,” you say. “Ten years ago I was a stupid kid. Ten years ago I was still working out what it meant to be bi, and believe me, the existential crises were epic. I was the worst partner imaginable. I wouldn’t have wanted to inflict that on you for the world.” His arm over your waist tightens infinitesimally, fingers stroking over your skin. “Also, ten years ago? I was all over the place. My attention span didn’t extend past the next college break. What if we’d slept together a few times and then drifted apart? Nothing could ever have lasted back then. I’d never have forgiven myself.”

Your words hang in the air between you. He props his head up on his hand, studying your face. “And you think something could last now?”

His voice is gentle and neutral. Your heart is a fragile open thing, and it might as well be lying unprotected on the center of your chest. You are going to get hurt so, so badly. “I think it could,” you say. “I would try to make it last. I would... I would want to.”

He looks at you for a moment. You stop breathing. Then he leans in and kisses you, lingering, not hard, not soft, just... just good. It doesn’t feel like a goodbye kiss. It also doesn’t feel like a let’s-get-married-and-move-to-the-suburbs kiss. It’s just Dave, and you, and it’s good, and that can be enough.

He pulls back a few inches. “Portland is only three hours from Seattle, you know,” he says.

You can’t resist the slow smile that breaks over your face. He laughs at you, his quiet laugh, and dips his head, kisses one corner of your mouth, then the other. “Still an open book,” he says softly.

You don’t even care. You kiss him again until he’s smiling too, then you keep kissing him until you’re both breathless.

“I’m not getting back to sleep, am I?” he asks.

“Seems unlikely.”

He groans and drops his head onto your chest with a thump. “I’m gonna need caffeine. Lots of caffeine.”

You look over at the nightstand where your mugs sit abandoned. “Well, our cups have gone cold, but there’s more in the kitchen. Think you can drag yourself there? I can make breakfast.”

“Can’t I buy breakfast in bed with sexual favors?”

“I don’t know,” you say, nuzzling his ear, kissing it until he actually squirms against you. “That’s worth an awful lot of favors. You might not have earned enough yet.”

“I can get started right away,” he says, and his hands go south.

You’ve just decided that breakfast can wait, possibly forever, when his stomach gives a loud rumble. You burst out laughing.

He has the grace to look sheepish. “Breakfast does sound pretty good too.”

You kiss him. “I’ll still be here afterward,” you say. “Come on. I think I have bacon in the fridge. And you can help me break in the waffle maker I’ve never used.”

You lend him a toothbrush and a pair of your pajama pants.

The second cups of coffee end up going cold on your nightstand too.


End file.
